Moving sea ice feels like ‘walking on the moon’
An inflatable boat transports passengers from a research vessel. Photo by: Eric Pohlman/National Science Foundation
Scientists in Antarctica are – for the first time ever – combining live satellite data with measurements made right at the surface of sea ice.
Physical scientist Thorsten Markus, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is traveling aboard a ship in the middle of the Antarctic sea ice, south of Australia. Sea ice is important to Earth’s climate in part because it buffers the warmer ocean below it from the colder atmosphere above.
Thorsten Markus: We know very little about the sea ice thickness and the snow depth on top of it. So we are down here to measure as hard as we can, and then once I’m back on land, to compare those measurements with the satellite data.
Markus and his colleagues helicoptered in to wide chunks of sea ice called ice floes. Using dipstick-like rulers, they measured how much ice was sticking up out of the water, and how much snow was riding that ice.
Thorsten Markus: It feels like you’re walking on the moon, essentially. At one point it cracked up and the ice, open water formed around us. And then we started to realize that we are actually on moving ice.
Our thanks today to NASA, in celebration of the International Polar Year.
Marcus’ project is just one of over 200 projects that make up the International Polar Year, where researchers are braving the extreme cold of Earth’s polar oceans to answer key scientific questions.
Our thanks to:
Thorsten Markus
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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